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his
    neck to see the peeling white paint on the widow’s walk. A light breeze toyed with his carefully barbered hair, still mostly its origi nal chestnut, and dimpled his white Brooks Brothers shirt around his gym-sculpted chest; his sleeves were painstakingly rolled to just below the elbow, in order to convey a sense of relaxation. He was thinking that this house was a far cry from the apartment building on Avenue A where he’d been born thirty-nine years ear lier, and where he’d grown up. He rarely thought of that place these days. He didn’t know what made him think of it now, un less it was the wondrous sense of full-circularity, the feeling that he’d finally arrived. Of course, having already arrived years ago, it was really only a new way of feeling it—the feeling being so ex ceedingly pleasant that he sought constantly to re-create it every day, in ways small and large, right down to the manner in which he flung his change at convenience store clerks. If only his parents could have seen this place. They would have been astounded at
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    his success. Nothing like this had been envisioned for their only son. Nothing had been envisioned for him at all, in fact; but it had already been many years since he’d forced himself to forget about that.
    This huge old house, now, Colt mused, was just the thing he needed to get away to once in a while, and to show off a little. It might even help him make partner—you had to show the higher- ups that you knew yourself what you were worth before you could hope for them to acknowledge it. In his early days, when he’d just been starting out as a stockbroker, Colt had noticed that all the men he respected most owned a country place. It was the ultimate brass ring, even better than a fancy car, or a big apart ment, or a beautiful wife. All those things were good to have, but a country place was proof that one had transcended the carnage of life in the city, and could lift out of earthly orbit at will, to fly off to a calmer, cooler, cleaner place. His first boss, at the brokerage firm he’d worked in after he’d finished school, had owned a monthlong timeshare in a tiny cottage on Long Island, just east of the Hamptons. He could walk out of his front door, turn right, go five hundred paces, and walk smack into the ocean. At the time, that had seemed to Colt like the highest state of luxury. The ocean was a place one went when times were good, and there was plenty of money. Colt himself had not seen the ocean with his own eyes until he was twenty-two years old.
    His boss now, Forszak, co-owner and senior partner of Anchor Capital Investments, had a palatial mansion in the Adirondacks that had once been featured on the television program America’s Castles. That was impressive, but Forszak also owned an apart ment in Hong Kong, which he used perhaps once a year. This was in addition to his penthouse overlooking Central Park, of course, a twenty-room apartment with a hot tub on the deck and a dining table that sat twenty-two. Forszak was wealthy beyond all earthly proportion; his holdings actually verged on the interplane tary. This was no mere exaggeration, for his name was on a list of
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    people waiting to fly to the moon, in a Russian spaceship that had yet to be built, at a cost of roughly $50 million per passenger. It was his serious ambition to be the first Hungarian Gypsy on the moon, and at age sixty-something, the oldest person to boot. Once his feet were firmly planted on the loose, gray dust of the lu nar surface, he intended to say his Roma prayers for all those who had been murdered by the Nazis, and to look down with a sense of supreme satisfaction on the planet whence his people had sprung, and where they had nearly expired, and revel in the fact that they, in the form of Forszak himself, had made it through, af ter all—barely. As the Nazis exterminated the Gypsies along with the Jews, twenty-seven Forszaks had gone